knives out is so good for so many reasons but I really appreciate how utterly, absolutely, devastatingly sad it is that Harlan didn't have to die. he didn't want anything bad to happen to Marta because of a mistake she didn't actually make. he would've been fine. she was his friend and he died to protect her. what a perfectly executed tragedy.

i like working at plant store. sometimes you ring up someone and there's a slug on their plant and so you're like "Oh haha you've got a friend there let me get that for you" and you put the slug on your hand for safekeeping but then its really busy and you dont have time to take the slug outside before the next customer in line so you just have a slug chilling on your hand for 15 minutes. really makes you feel at peace with nature. also it means sometimes i get to say my favorite line which is "would you like this free slug with your purchase"

@holyknuckled you get it. lterally what are we here on earth for if not to occasionally impose gastropods upon unsuspecting customers. this story is delightful

@holyknuckled like that?

oh? my god???

yeah, Exactly like that

Poob has it for you

i'm going to become the joker

Okay

Yeah that’s

Yeah

Look I love unconditional devotion love stories as much as the next person, but there's really something so deliciously raw about conditional devotion.

I have served you and I have loved you for decades, but I will not give up my principles for you. You cut out part of my heart and took it with you down that path that you insist on walking, but you walk it alone. Even when the bleeding, gaping hole you left in my chest kills me, I will not follow you.

me everytime one of my seemingly non-specific homoerotic text posts breaks containment

🏳️‍🌈 Answer the question susie 🏳️‍🌈

went to the gallery today but the best art I saw today was on this electrical box outside

?????? rich people are losing it

to be clear, yes i would also do some of this if i had the money. im experiencing blinding envy over the dr pepper mirror dimension.

i think the near-extinction of people making fun, deep and/or unique interactive text-based browser games, projects and stories is catastrophic to the internet. i'm talking pre-itch.io era, nothing against it.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

if you're ever thinking about making a niche project that only a select number of individuals will be nerdy enough to enjoy, keep in mind i've been playing some of these games off and on for 20~ years (Alter Ego, for example). quite literally a lifetime of replayability.

since this post blew up, i've been wanting to do an addition with all of the recommendations from the comments and tags. but there's a lot of them. some people might be crazy enough to sit down and seriously put them all in one post with descriptions. those people are honestly sick in the head.

anyway, here's all of the recommendations from the reblogs. not all of them are text-based, but it's a great mixture of styles. also don't forget the links in the second paragraph of the OP which will take you to FMHY where there are a bunch more games listed.

Games

Tools

Non-Games

thank you to everyone who contributed and the creators. please be sure to show them some love where possible.

adding onto this with my FAVORITE almost-game— Terminal 00. MASSIVE cw for loud noises and flashing. like, seriously, I don't have epilepsy or anything and it gives me a headache sometimes.

within its "genre" are things like the aforementioned superbad, and other sites like Wired Sounds for Wired People (same warnings as t00) and Mebious (unknown warnings, proceed with caution)

It's out there. you just need to know where to look.

There’s a plant called the “TomTato” which is a cherry tomato plant with potatoes as roots. It yields large quantities of both tomatoes and spuds.

OK BUT YOU LEFT OUT THAT THEY CALL IT “KETCHUP N’ FRIES” IN MARKETING.

the fun thing about this is while it may be marketed ts you can do this yourself. it usually comes as grown seedlings or potted plant if its the genuine deal and not fake amazon seeds (fake seeds and seed scams are a big thing on amazon). but anyways these plants are made via grafting which is really pretty simple.

right now late june might be too late to try this out and get good results BUT. pick out any variety of tomato plant you like best. i prefer a good slicing tomato for sandwiches, not cherry tomatoes. any thing like Better Boy or even Black Cherokee is tasty. the other part is choosing a potato plant. you got to pick out a potato you like too. this has to be done before either plant starts fruiting or blossoming in the spring.

here’s you a video how to assemble your Frankenstein plant :D

“sometimes you can just tape two sorta-related plants together and get double crop frankenplant” is one of my favorite biology hacks.

@tavina-writes

if you don’t know about grafting plants and want a fun rabbit hole to get all alice in wanderland about, allow me to scurry past you checking my pocket watch

THIS is a tree that grows 40 different kinds of fruit.

It is called a Tree of Forty Fruits and was grafted by art professor Sam Van Aken.

Personally, i’ve always wanted to combine this technique with an espalier, which is where you grow a tree flat against a wall so it looks sorta like a candelabra like these

which i think would be dope with a different fruit grafted to form each couple of branches

the point would be so you could have, for example, a courtyard garden with like 20 different tree-grown fruits but still have most of the space in the middle of the courtyard for the rest of your garden. Which obviously should include some tom tatoes

anyway plant shit is wild

This is the stuff I think elves and other long lived species in fiction with a connection to plants should do but times 10 to make them interesting; think what they could get up to when bored and have personal projects over the centuries.

oh this is also an old one

Remember when AOC said this. The elitism is so explicit with identifying political conviction and academia too

They really can't.

High school illiteracy is at a near all-time high. Grammar is nonexistent in social circles. They don't have the patience to write a research paper. If they do get away with cheating like this in college, they won't have the skills or knowledge to make it in any tech, medical, or academic field.

My cousin teaches at a nursing school. She failed over 70% of her students last term because they used AI for their papers. How did she find out? She tested them on their own papers. Most of them failed. When they admitted to using AI, she failed them out of the class and told them to come back when they were ready to be an adult. The school agreed.

There HAVE to be regulations set on AI usage before these dipshit kids kill people because AI told them that fluconazole is safe to administer to a patient who is currently on dabigatran.

Half of my clients are parents whose teenage/adult kids claim the work is "too boring" or "too stressful" because they aren't willing to learn how. They want to play on their phones instead. Too many kids just... can't learn.

It's a very real problem that isn't going away anytime soon. We put the carrot on the string for them, and then made the carrot infinite and the string too long. Now they don't need to learn.

I really think this is the wrong takeaway. AI is absolutely a problem, and I don't think your cousin was in the wrong here- especially in the context of medicine. And also.

Education does not need to be externally motivated. This isn't a carrot on a string thing. This is a bunch of kids in a situation they don't want to be in, asked to do shit they don't want to do, lacking any sort of real understanding of why any of the things they're being asked to do matter at all, and lacking the support they need to actually do the things they're being asked to do. AI isn't a carrot on a string; it's an escape route.

Creating an environment where kids understand the importance of learning these skills, and feel supported and encouraged enough to apply themselves, is a genuinely monumental task. There is an entire body of research on this topic. There are lots of people doing it successfully, too, and many of them are doing it in public schools (yes, even in the US).

Just to touch on a few of the actual systemic solutions here, from someone whose degree is in this:

People naturally want to learn. Forcing them to learn when they don't want to actively kills that instinct. Overloading them with other stressors and pressure makes actual learning impossible, even when they do actively want to learn.

They don't need less carrot and more stick. They aren't donkeys, and school isn't a farmer's field they need to plow. They need authentic mentorship and support in order to develop and reach their own goals, because they are human people with value and lives, and education is supposed to be for them.

So one of my tweets kinda blew up. :v

This reminds me of the time that a Hungarian doctor called Ignaz Semmelweiss noticed that the bulk of patients in a maternity ward treated by doctors were dying horribly, while the ones treated by nurses were more likely to survive.

He figured out that this was because the doctors were dissecting corpses inbetween delivering babies, while the nurses weren’t, and came up with his controversial “hey, why don’t we all wash our filthy, filthy hands before sticking them in a woman?” theory.

The result, short term, was that the mortality rate on this one maternity ward decreased by a ridiculous amount. They went from “write your will before you come here, because you’re probably gonna die” to “we’re not 100% sure, but you’ll probably live”.

The result, long term, was that Semmelweiss was hated by absolutely everybody, lost his reputation and had his career suffer terribly.

His eventual reward was that eventually people finally started sashimg their hands with soap before operations, history remembers him as a misunderstood hero, and the instinctive angry and defensive reaction so many people give whenconfronted with new ideas that conflict with their established view of the world is now called ‘the Semmelweiss reflex’.

Because some people care more about themselves not being wrong than they do about things in general being right.

respectfully sir. What??

any computer people wanna explain how the hell this works

it wont let me do shit bc i apparently have 81 gigs of apps clogging my c drive, but my largest app is 0.4gb?????? its not system applications either because system is its own segment of storage. wadda hell are you talking about

guys i installed a program to show me exactly where the data is hidden and i think i found it and youre never gonna believe it

todd howard im fucking coming for you

"thank you random microsoft customer support agent" we all say in unison